Dead Heat

CHAPTER 9

Leslie called them at seven in the morning. Anna answered Charles’s cell because Charles was just emerging from the shower.

“I heard you stopped in at the Millers’, about an hour before a pair of my FBI agents stopped in,” Leslie said. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes and no,” Anna told her. “We confirmed that Amethyst has been missing for months. We have one of her stuffed animals that Charles and I can use for scent if we get close enough. No one who lives nearby is a fae. Or else they’re hiding their scent trail all the time, which Charles assures me is unlikely. Most fae don’t expect to have werewolves on their trail.”

“Okay,” Leslie said. “I’d have preferred you talk to me before you go off hunting on your own.”

“Okay,” said Anna, deliberately unspecific about what she was okay about.

Leslie laughed tiredly. “So I have people doing background checks on anyone who has worked at the day care, but that’s not a priority. I think that the day care trouble was caused by the fetch. All of the people who died were connected in some way to Amethyst.”

“That’s what we think, too,” said Anna.

“What we have been doing is compiling two lists. The first is weird things that have happened in the vicinity of the day care. For the second, Leeds suggested that maybe the fetch was not the first or the last this fae has made. So we’ve made some calls to local counselors, psychologists, and anyone else we could think of, asking about children who have had sudden personality changes. We still have some calls coming in on that. What we’d like to do is have you ride with me for the weird things and Charles ride with Leeds and Marsden looking into the kids. I know you usually work together, but neither the Cantrip agents nor I could tell if someone was fae or fetch if they spit on us.”

“Leeds can’t tell if someone is fae or not?” Anna asked.

“He says he’s hit-and-miss, and we can’t afford a miss. We have eleven calls to make; with luck we can do most of those today.”

“Fast work,” Anna said. She heard a huff of breath that might have been a laugh, hard to tell over the phone.

“We have a kid in danger, Anna. We take that seriously. Lots of folks have been up all night putting this information together for us.”

“Yes,” said Anna. “So where do you want to meet up? I don’t know this area, so I’ll need a real address.”

When she hung up, she looked at Charles, who was toweling off his hair; he’d heard most of the call. “We get to go and make people talk.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I’ll try not to scare some poor kid so badly he can’t talk for a year. You try not to get attacked by some fae who doesn’t understand how dangerous you are because you look so soft and sweet.”

She thought about her reply for a moment because his voice was just a little too neutral.

“Nah,” she said casually, answering him as if she thought her reply didn’t matter. “You scare adults pretty good—you’ve got that ‘I could kill you with my little finger’ thing going for you. But the kids or the adults who are hurt … you are safe and they know it. Doesn’t mean they aren’t shy with you, but they know they’re safe.” She’d known it.

Sure he’d scared her when she first met him—she wasn’t stupid. He was big and she knew all about how even between werewolves, big counts. But her instincts had told her that this one, this one would stand between her and anyone who would hurt her. That aura of guardianship—that was what made her mate such a powerful Alpha.

Charles just stared at her.

“You know that, right?” she said. “Most people stay out of your way, but the defenseless ones, the hurt ones, they just sort of gradually slide into your shadow. Not where you’ll notice them too much—but you keep the bad things away.”

He still didn’t say anything. She buttoned her jeans and then took the two steps to press against him. “We know,” she whispered to him. “We who have been hurt, we know what evil looks like. We know you make us safe.”

He didn’t say anything, but his arms came around her and she knew that she had told him something he didn’t know—and that it mattered.

Charles had one of Kage’s people drop them off at the airport, where he rented a car as Mr. Smith. He took out the fake driver’s license with the credit card he kept for Mr. Smith. Anna watched him fill out the fake address without hesitation.

When they were walking toward the elevator in the parking garage that would take them to their car, she whispered, “For an honest man, you lie pretty smoothly, Mr. Smith.”

He gave her one of his eyes-only smiles.

There were four cars to choose from, identical except in color. Charles raised an eyebrow at Anna and she trotted around them, pondering.

“Gray, white, and silver would all blend in,” she told him.

“By all means let’s take the metallic orange,” he agreed somberly. She grinned at him.

She drove the orange car and he navigated. Brother Wolf didn’t like traffic, didn’t like driving at all, and was unpredictable enough in his road rage that Charles didn’t like to drive, either, if he could avoid it. And both of them trusted Anna, he’d told her.

She knew that she wasn’t a spectacular driver; the best she could do was steady and law-abiding. She didn’t take chances and she laughed about the rude drivers. Even Brother Wolf had to work to get upset about someone making Anna laugh, Charles told her.

She sincerely hoped that over the next few days they didn’t meet the guy who’d flipped her off as they left the airport. Only by slamming her brakes hard had she avoided hitting him. Why was it that the people who made idiots of themselves immediately felt it necessary to compound their sins by flipping off the people who saved them from possibly fatal mistakes?

Yes, she hoped that the moron didn’t come anywhere near Charles anytime soon.

With Charles running the car’s navigation system, they made it to the coffee shop exactly on time. They managed greetings all around—and coffee in great big cups.

“If I could get a permanent IV of this stuff into my veins,” Marsden murmured as they all filed out of the coffee shop and into the parking lot, “I’d go into a happy coffee coma and never come out again until I died of sheer contentment. Not just any coffee, you understand, only extra-dark mocha caramel from this shop.” He cupped it in both hands like it was something precious to him.

Leeds sipped his apple cider and looked at Anna. “I know I’m weird,” he said. “But I was preoccupied and didn’t notice what the rest of you were discussing. You’ll have to forgive me if I ask you something you already answered for him. You said you and your husband are both werewolves?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“How did that happen?” he asked earnestly. “Did he fall for you and then bite you? Or did you bite him? Or did you go to a werewolf dating site? I didn’t know there were actually women werewolves at all. The only ones you see on TV are men.”

Marsden thunked him gently on the back of the head. “I can’t leave you with anyone, can I? I like having you as a partner. It’s refreshing working with someone who can speak in whole sentences, and I can use words of more than one syllable. Please, for my sake, make an effort not to irritate werewolves. New partners are a crapshoot.”

“No,” said Anna, laughing. “It’s okay. We met because I got myself into trouble and I called for help.” She glanced at Leslie. “Like your bosses did in the Boston case. Charles came and cleaned up my trouble neat as you please. I thought, ‘Hey, I could use a guy like that.’ So I kept him.”

“You didn’t get yourself into trouble,” growled Charles. “You got yourself out of it.”

Leeds looked at Charles, and Anna saw it in his eyes as he looked at her husband. He was one of the ones who’d been hurt, one of the ones who saw that her Charles protected the helpless. Interestingly, Marsden saw it, too. The hand that had been resting on his partner’s shoulder tightened. Leeds glanced at him and smiled.

“That’s why I’m taking you with me,” Leslie told her quietly. “You see a lot of things that happen without words.” In a carrying voice, she said, “Okay, you goons. Go find our perp. We’ll rendezvous here at sixteen hundred hours if no one finds anything worth calling each other about.”

As it turned out, Leslie and Anna had identical rental cars, parked several spaces apart. Anna glanced at Leslie and laughed. “Guess we’re going to have to use the fob to see which car is which?”

“No,” Leslie said after a moment. “Mine has a scratch on the driver’s-side door. It’s the closer one. You might as well leave yours locked,” she continued in a no-argument tone. “I’m driving.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “The mommy voice doesn’t work on me,” she informed Leslie. “I was raised by my dad, a very logical, calm man who explained things in a normal tone. When he swore, it was in Latin, mostly directed at my brother.”

Leslie assessed her. “The only person I trust besides me to get my butt where it needs to go in safety is currently teaching second graders how to multiply by twos. Do you mind if I drive?”

“See,” asked Anna, walking around to the passenger seat, “was that so hard?”

“Anna,” said Leslie, “I think I could learn to get along with you just fine. Go through those files and see what you want to start with.”

There was a stack of files tucked in between the seats. Fourteen new in various colors and one faded and battered. She opened the battered one and said, “1978?”

“Five-year-old boy—attempted kidnapping except that the boy had a big dog who heard him cry out. And—” She stopped. “You read that file and tell me what you think.”

Anna read. And thought. “This sounds right. The fae don’t like to move.” Bran had told her that once. There were a few that moved all the time, but most of them found a place and stayed if they could. “Most of them, anyway. They don’t age. And they don’t change their rituals, not unless they’re High Court fae.” And to think just a few years ago the only things she’d known about the fae had come from Disney movies. “They can’t.”

“That’s what Leeds said. He said we were making this perp too human. He’s the one who went digging in older files. Found four cases that fit, but that one was the only one where the kid escaped. This kid grew up and still lives in the Phoenix area. Teaches higher mathematics at Arizona State.” She gave Anna a challenging smile. “Why don’t you call him and see if we can make an appointment.”

As it turned out, Professor Alexander Vaughn had just finished his two morning classes and had the rest of the day free. Did they want to meet him at his house? He’d be delighted to entertain an FBI agent and her consultant—they should reach his house in Tempe about the same time.

Anna assured him that would be lovely.

“He didn’t ask what it was about,” Anna observed after hanging up.

“Could be a crime groupie,” said Leslie. “Lots of people are. Could be he is bored or lonely or anything. No speculation until after we talk to him.”

“FBI policy?”

“My policy. Assumptions drive an interview away from interesting places.”

“All right,” Anna said. “We’ll go talk to the professor.”

Leslie pulled up to a house that had been built in the fifties. Evidently they had beaten the professor there. Leslie did not obey speed limits as well as Anna. She arrived fifteen minutes earlier than the car’s navigation system’s estimate.

The house was large and most notable because it was not built in the Southwest adobe style Anna’s eyes were getting used to. Nor was the yard xeriscaped with the conscientious water conservation she saw everywhere. Green grass covered the very small front area and huge old trees surrounded the house. Likely the shade from the trees was how the grass survived summers here.

A Volvo, older but in pristine condition, purred into the driveway and disgorged an athletic man with a military-short cut that managed to tone down his bright red hair. He shut the door and took his time looking at them. Anna returned the favor. He looked a little younger than someone who had been five in 1978.

He walked toward them slowly and said, “Can I help you, ladies?”

“Professor Vaughn?” asked Leslie.

He shook his head. “No. Who are you? Why are you looking for Alex?”

The roar of an engine distracted them and a big truck pulled into the driveway beside the Volvo. The truck was painted black with bright pink flames and jacked up high enough it wallowed when it turned.

The door popped open and a mad scientist hopped out, looking very out of place in the redneck vehicle.

“It’s okay, love,” he called out. “If you answered your cell phone I’d have updated you.”

The red-haired man turned to the professor, tilted his head, and said, “I don’t talk while I’m driving. And you shouldn’t call while you are driving, Bluetooth or no. I don’t want to get that phone call.”

The mad scientist nodded, kissed the big man on the cheek, and patted his shoulder. “I’m Alex Vaughn and this bulldog is my partner, Darin Richards of the Phoenix Police Department. He worries, that’s his job. Dare, these are the FBI, they want to talk to me.”

Darin’s head jerked first to his partner and then to the two women. His eyes narrowed. “ID,” he said.

Leslie showed him her badge and he examined it. He frowned and said, “I don’t know you. I work with the local FBI office a lot.”

“They brought me out especially for this case,” Leslie said.

He looked at Anna, and she raised both hands. “Don’t look at me, I’m just a consultant.”

“And you are here to speak with Alex.”

“With Dr. Vaughn,” Leslie said. “Yes.”

“Dare,” said the mad scientist. “It’s okay.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, without agreeing at all. “Why are you here?”

“We have to do this on the lawn?” asked Leslie, not losing her smile.

“Dare,” said Alex gently. “What are they going to do? Shoot me? Let’s go in and have some coffee and talk.” He looked at Leslie. “I have a stalker, a former student. She quite often calls in complaints and we have police officers come to investigate strange noises, screaming, shots fired. You name it. The Tempe PD knows her, but occasionally she gets one through to a rookie. The fire department was here last week at two in the morning because she reported a fire. I guess she got tired of not getting a response.”

“We are definitely not here because someone called in a complaint,” Leslie said. “We’d like to interview you about an attempted kidnapping—yours—that happened in June of 1978.”

Both men’s faces went blank with surprise.

Darin recovered first. “You never told me you were kidnapped. Freaking damn it, Alex. You’d have been six in ’78. June. You’d have been five.”

“Attempted.” Dr. Vaughn sounded shell-shocked. “I don’t think the police even believed me. My dad installed a security system and my mom fed the dog steak every day for a week.”

“No one believed in fairies back then,” Anna said. “We’re all clapping our hands for Tinker Bell now, though. We have a missing child who lives four blocks from where you grew up. Would you mind talking to us about what happened?”

“Sure,” he said. “I guess. I was five, though. And it’s been a long time.”

“How about I go next door and see if your mom is home,” said Darin. “That woman has a mind like a steel trap. She’ll remember what you told her when it happened.”

“You think it was a fae?” asked Dr. Vaughn.

“He was green and hairy. His hands had six fingers with claws on them,” Anna said matter-of-factly. She’d memorized the words on the first reading—it hadn’t been hard. The boy’s terror and the police officer’s skepticism rang through in the dry words typewritten on paper older than Anna. She continued, “His voice was funny—like on TV sometimes. He had a long yellow tongue and he called you a barn. He said, ‘Come here, barn.’” She looked at the police officer. “If someone reported it now, Darin Richards, instead of years before the fae admitted their existence, what would you say it was?”

“Barn,” said Darin. “‘Bairn’ means child, right? If he was in Scotland instead of Scottsdale.”

“Yes,” said Leslie.

“You go in and have some coffee,” said Darin. In a gentler voice he said, “That sure explains some of your nightmares, Alex. You take them in and I’ll be right back.”

The mad scientist—well, mad mathematician—paced back and forth in the house even though he’d seated Leslie and Anna at the table and put coffee in front of them. He had that kind of kinky hair that never lies down right, and it was about two inches too long or ten inches too short to look good. Especially if it belonged to the kind of person who grabbed it and twisted or pulled when he was nervous.

Anna thought he was adorable. She wanted to adopt him as a big brother and give him a big hug to calm down his rising anxiety.

“My dad was a cop,” he said.

Leslie nodded. “That was in the report.”

“If he hadn’t been a cop, there wouldn’t have been a report,” Dr. Vaughn said. “He believed me. By the time I was ten, I didn’t know why. Hell, I kinda don’t believe me now. I mean, this thing looked like it was eight feet tall, and it ran away from my dog and a horseshoe I threw at it?”

“That dog impressed whoever wrote the report,” Anna said. There hadn’t been any photos of the dog in it, but she had a pretty good idea that “BFDog” in the report (complete with exclamation point and a penciled-in remark that read “I’d have run from that thing, too”) meant it wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill dog.

“Yeah.” Dr. Vaughn quit pacing and grinned. “My dad brought him home from work one day a few years before the … incident. I don’t remember it, but it’s one of those family stories, you know? My mom was scared of him and wanted Dad to take him back where he found it. Then that big dog walked up to her and put his nose on her foot and sighed. He stared at her until she fed him. She was a goner after that.”

He smiled at the memory, then sobered. “We only had him for another month or so after that. One day, he just wasn’t around. Maybe he was hit by a car or something. I think Dad knew exactly what happened because he never went looking for him. And hit by a car is the kind of thing you might not tell a kid. Hey, I ran across a photo of him the other day.”

He booked out of the kitchen, the speed an indicator of how grateful he was for the distraction, and Anna could hear him in another room opening and shutting drawers.

Leslie started to say something, but Anna shook her head. She could hear people talking just outside. In a moment Darin opened the door and escorted a tiny female version of Dr. Vaughn into the kitchen.

She frowned at Leslie and Anna and sat down opposite them with regal suspicion. “Darin tells me that you are here to ask about the time something came into our yard and tried to take my son away,” she said.

“We think it was a fae,” Leslie said. “It sounds like a fae. It acted like a fae. And a fae took a little girl and left a changeling, a fetch, in her place. We are trying to find that little girl. She is five years old. The attempted abduction of your son is not far from where we think our girl was taken. Thirty-odd years might be a long time for us, but it’s a minute to one of the fae.”

The stiffness left Dr. Vaughn’s mother’s back, and she softened. “Thirty years doesn’t feel that long ago to me, either.” She looked up at her son’s partner and said, “Sit, sit, Darin. I gather that Alex never told you about this.”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, I think he wanted to believe it didn’t happen.”

“What do you think?” asked Leslie.

“I think my son never exaggerated or lied about a thing in his life, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. He was twelve when he told us he liked boys instead of girls. That was right after some friend of his got kicked out of his home for doing the same. Stupid people tossing away the most precious thing God saw fit to give them, I say.” She looked at Leslie. “So yes, I believe him. I also believe we have not been introduced. I am Mary Lu Vaughn.”

“FBI Special Agent Leslie Fisher,” said Leslie as Dr. Vaughn came into the room and put a photo on the table with an air of quiet triumph.

“Anna Smith,” said Anna, staring at the photo of two small children trying to tug a rope from an enormous black animal, “special consultant. And that is a werewolf.”

Charles sat in the front passenger seat, since Leeds had taken one look at him trying to fit in the back and said, “Hey, man, that is just not going to happen, is it? No worries, I’ll catch the backseat.”

Charles wasn’t thrilled with having a stranger behind him, but even Brother Wolf couldn’t make that man feel like a threat, so he figured it would be okay. He didn’t like Marsden’s driving, either. He drove too fast and he didn’t have a werewolf’s reflexes. But if there was a wreck, Charles figured that he, at least, would walk away, so he kept his comments to himself.

“So we’ve concentrated our efforts in Scottsdale because Leeds thinks that this fae probably doesn’t have a huge hunting ground. The ones that steal children tend to get attached to one place even more than the usual fae.”

He waited, so Charles said, “It sounds like a reasonable way to make an impossibly big search smaller.”

“Okay,” Marsden said. “The first place we’re going is a foster home to visit with a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl’s parents gave her up to the state, said they couldn’t deal with her anymore. Claimed she was possessed, things flying around the room with no one touching them, which is why we are visiting even though she’s older than the girl who was taken. Her parents said she was dangerous, but the counselor who gave us this one said she was uncommunicative but showed no signs of violence. The foster mom says we’re okay to talk to her as long as we do it with the foster mom in the room.”

“Why isn’t she in school?” asked Charles.

“Yeah,” Marsden agreed. “I don’t know. But we’ll ask.”

The house they drove to looked pretty much like all the rest of the houses on the street. This was not an upscale neighborhood, but it wasn’t poor, either.

The woman who met them at the door was a human in her midfifties, if Charles was any judge. She introduced herself as Judy White, examined Marsden’s and Leeds’s badges, and frowned at Charles. She wasn’t unhappy about them, but she was careful.

“Consultant,” said Leeds. “No official ID.”

She looked grim. Grimmer. But just nodded. “Blair’s not going to talk to any of you,” she said. “She came here two weeks ago and she hasn’t spoken a word to anyone. She doesn’t eat much. If I could have a word with her parents…” She sucked in a breath. “Well, don’t stand out here. Come in.”

She led them into a house that smelled of … Charles shut his eyes to get a deep breath. Cookies, recently baked. Fresh homemade bread. A man, a woman, three children, and someone in between; that would be the girl they were looking for. Sorrow. This house had seen a lot of sorrow, but there was a warmth to it, too. Nothing smelled like the fetch, which had carried hints of greenwood, magic, and darkness.

He shut the door behind him and tried not to feel like an invading giant when the woman led them to a room with two couches and a couple of those soft squishy chairs, the kind that could unfold with footrests. Charles would let himself be shot before he sat in one of those. They always felt like they were trying to swallow him, and they were impossible to get out of quickly.

He was still trying to decide where to sit when the woman brought in a tall girl of about fourteen wearing clothes that would fit a woman twice her size. She didn’t look at any of them, just sat on the edge of one of the person-swallowing chairs, a pale-skinned, pale-haired girl who was little more than skin and bones. The word that occurred to him wasn’t “starving” but “fading.” This was why no one sent her to school. Even blind humans must be able to tell that she was mostly gone already.

Judy White introduced Marsden and Leeds but made no mention of Charles—and he was fine with that. He watched as Marsden and Leeds did a fair job of good cop/bad cop, Leeds unexpectedly playing bad cop. The girl saw them all right, but she said not a word and gave no reaction to anything they said.

She is abandoned, something whispered in his left ear. Into his right, something else said, Her true name is sorrow.

He did not always act upon the things the spirits told him. They were interested in this girl. They hovered unseen, even by him, in the air around her.

She could be anger, they told him. She could be vengeance, for she has much to be angry about, much to avenge. Those who should have cared for her acted for themselves when they rightly should have acted for her. She has been much sinned against.

This, he thought, this half child, half woman was where the sorrow that was trying to enfold this house was coming from. He’d told the Cantrip agents he wouldn’t talk, but he couldn’t let this lie. Someone needed to help her before she chose to leave this existence. He had the sure feeling that she would be needed somewhere in the future, that terrible things would happen without her. But that was not why he chose to act. Brother Wolf liked her.

He knelt on the floor at her feet, interrupting Marsden trying to coax her to speak. Judy White leaned forward as if she would have put herself between them, then paused as she realized this was no attack.

Tempering his usual fierceness not at all, Brother Wolf said, “Little sister. What makes your eyes weep with dry tears and your bold heart ache with pain? What service can we do for you? We will stand for you in any way you need us.” And because it was Brother Wolf speaking, Charles felt the words reach through the barriers she had erected between herself and the world.

She blinked at him, and no one in the room said anything as he waited for her to speak.

She cleared her throat. “I’m not your sister,” she said hoarsely.

But she was confused, not reputing them, so Charles and his wolf waited. They were here to serve her, not to pull information from her, not to take. Too many people had already taken from her.

“My baby,” she said, finally. “They made me … and I thought, what could I do with a baby? Her father didn’t want her and my parents didn’t want her. So I let them. I should have stopped them. I should have protected her. She didn’t have anyone else. She’s dead, she’s dead before she had a chance to be born and no one cares. They wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong.”

And when she said the last word, no more than a whisper, an entire shelf of children’s games fell off the bookcase they’d been on with a crash.

About an hour and a half later, Charles belted himself back in the Chevy and waited for Marsden to drive. But they just sat there with the engine running for a little.

“How did you know?” Marsden said.

“I’m a werewolf,” he told Marsden. “I know about all sorts of things. Wizards, humans who can manipulate the physical world, aren’t common, but they happen.”

“Frightening for her,” said Leeds. “To find out that when you get mad things fly around. Do you think the woman you recommended her foster mother talk to might help her?” He sounded like he knew all about being alone with funky powers.

“I wouldn’t have given her the name if I didn’t.” Charles wondered what Leeds’s fae blood had left him with as a legacy. But as long as he wasn’t stealing children, Charles didn’t care. He considered that for a moment, but he could smell Leeds’s fae blood quite clearly and it bore no resemblance to whatever had bespelled Chelsea or stolen the child.

“Fourteen,” said Marsden. He swore with feeling. “Whoever was watching out for her should have been shot.” He paused. “That baby’s father died—did you catch that? Hit by a car in a freak accident.”

“I hope it was her,” said Leeds, then, almost contradicting himself, “and I hope she never knows it.”

“That was powerful,” Marsden said. “What you did in there, Charles.” He rubbed the steering wheel. “It should have been absurd—you know. But it was powerful.”

“He is a dominant werewolf,” said Leeds. “When he submitted himself to her will … of course it was powerful. What if she had asked you to kill her parents? The ones who abandoned her, abandoned her twice, by my accounting.”

“Her name was sorrow,” said Charles. “All she needed was for someone to hear her so she could mourn.”

“But what if?”

He didn’t owe Leeds that answer, especially since Brother Wolf was insulted that he would ask.

Still.

“What do you think?” Charles said softly.

After a moment, Marsden drove away from the curb. “Could you tell me the address of the next one, Leeds?”

The next one was another girl, Helena, age thirteen. Her parents and counselor insisted on staying for the interview. They also answered every question Marsden or Leeds asked Helena. The upshot was that they, parents and counselor, were certain that she was possessed by a demon.

“Meth,” said Charles quietly into Marsden’s ear.

Marsden extracted them quickly.

“We need help,” said the counselor. “You folks are supposed to know how to deal with this.”

Marsden frowned at them. “Meth isn’t demon possession. You change her friends and get her into a rehab program. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.” He glanced at the parents. “You should also get her a better counselor.”

The third child, another girl, Iris, was five. Her single-parent father, who introduced himself as Trent Carter, was over his head and looked it. Knew it, according to the notes the counselor had given them.

The girl’s mother had committed suicide when she was only a toddler. Her father, in sweatshirt and jeans, looked exhausted and underweight. The little girl was dressed in a similar outfit, but in pink, and she had her hair up in lopsided pigtails.

Charles let Marsden and Leeds question both parent and child without saying anything at all. The little girl was happy to talk to them, even though she bowed her head shyly when they asked her a direct question. Eventually, she showed them bruises on her wrists and legs and told them she was clumsy and fell down stairs. Her father paled and looked away.

When Marsden finally looked at Charles, he shook his head. She wasn’t fae. Not what they were looking for at all.

Reluctantly, the Cantrip agents left the pair sitting on opposite sides of the room.

“Damn,” said Marsden. “Did you see those bruises? We got referred by a counselor, right? Why didn’t they get that girl out of there?”

Leeds looked at Charles. “Why aren’t you angry? I mean, when that first girl came in … the ethereal temperature of the room dropped into the subarctic zone.”

“Sometimes,” Charles said, “anger, though I am well acquainted with both it and its useful cousin vengeance, is not the appropriate response.”

Marsden opened his mouth and Charles said, “Where to next?”

He got in the car and shut the door. After a pause both agents did the same. They drove sedately away from Iris and her father.

“And that, gentlemen, is an actual demon possession,” Charles said once they were well on their way.

“The man?” asked Marsden. “That’s why he hurt his daughter?” As if he couldn’t imagine anyone hurting his own daughter otherwise.

Charles hadn’t wanted to like either of these men, though he deemed them useful and perhaps necessary for his hunt. The other Cantrip agents he had dealt with … But these men were decent people.

“The fingerprints on the bruises were too small,” said Leeds suddenly. “Those bruises, she did them to herself. I thought there was something off about her.” He paused. “Is there something we can do for them? Do you know someone you can send them to for help?”

“I’ll look into it,” Charles promised.

“Okay, then,” said Marsden. “This next one is a boy, a teenager, and he’s a long shot. He fits neither our profile nor our neighborhood. But the counselor for this one is quite insistent that there is a problem…”

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Vaughn’s mother mildly. “Sid’s great-grandfather or some such. His human wife had just died and the whole family was concerned about him; he wasn’t eating or drinking. We thought that his Alpha might just put him out of his misery. So Sid drove over to his house in his squad car, told him he was coming home with him. And when Archie turned into a wolf to discourage him, Sid said, ‘Fine. Be a wolf. But you are coming home with me.’”

She looked at Anna. “He just loved our kids, Archie did. Let Alex’s older sister dress him in whatever pink and frilly thing she wanted. Pulled a wagon for the kids and saved my Alex’s life, I think. He was cantankerous as a human, but he was the best dog this family ever had.”

“I can’t believe no one ever told me he was a werewolf.” Alex let out a laugh. “Do you remember the Christmas turkey? No wonder you were so mad.” He paused, then looked at his mother with horror. “The flea bath. You gave a werewolf a flea bath. He was not happy about it. No wonder Dad was so upset when he got home.”

“He had fleas,” she said primly. “I wasn’t letting him sleep in your room with fleas.”

“So what did happen to him?” Dr. Vaughn asked.

“His Alpha came and got him, finally. Told your dad that it wasn’t healthy for a werewolf to stay in wolf form for that long. He went back to his house. Apparently the pack had kept it clean and the bills paid while he lived with us. He visited a couple of times, but he eventually had to move for work. I think that living in his house just wasn’t good for him.” She pursed her lips. “We never heard from him after that. I know your dad was unhappy, but there wasn’t much we could do. Werewolves don’t let humans interfere with their pack. Matters are less tense now, of course, because everyone knows about werewolves. But then? I think we had a wolf watching us for a while, just to make sure no one was talking.”

She looked at Anna. “Are you a werewolf, dear?”

“Yes,” said Anna. She didn’t mind, but the unexpectedness of the question caught her off guard.

“Mom,” said Dr. Vaughn. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what, dear?” she asked.

Darin chuckled. “I love you, Mary Lu. And I need to recruit you for the PD. Our confession rates would go way the hell up.”

“Do you know this werewolf’s full name?” Anna asked. “He saw the fae and he wasn’t a five-year-old kid. Maybe he can help us if we can find him.”

“Archibald Vaughn, dear.”

“I’m thinking you’ll have an easier time finding Archibald Vaughn than I will,” said Leslie.

“Probably,” Anna agreed. “Do you want me to start making calls?”

“Let’s check out the rest of these first,” she said after a moment’s thought. “We scored big on the first one, maybe there will be a second.”

“Okay.” Anna picked out another file and read off the address. She called the phone number of the witness before she waded through the four-page report. No answer. She checked the paperwork and found no other phone number. She skimmed the report. This one was a clean printout on white paper.

“You’ve got to hear this,” Anna said. She tried to keep her voice businesslike as she quoted the witness report for Leslie. “It was a unicorn and two small dragons, no bigger than a poodle. Not the little ones. Well, not really the medium-sized ones, either. But you, know, a big poodle. Standard. The unicorn was bigger. More like a black lab, maybe. Or a big German shepherd.”

“Why did we pick this one out?” Leslie asked.

Anna kept reading—this time to herself. “Oh. Here it is. She has been looking for fairies ever since she saw the green man living in her garden a couple of years ago. He never leaves and no one else can see him. Except for the dog who jogs past every day with his owner. The dog barks at him every time he passes our witness’s garden.”

“All right,” said Leslie. “You try that number again and if he’s not home—”

“She,” said Anna. “Kathryn Jamison, age sixty-four.” There was another report behind the first—it had another witness’s name on it. She reported that her dog barked every day as they passed Jamison’s garden. She didn’t say anything about the unicorn and dragons.

“We can at least get a look at her garden the same way the jogging lady’s dog does, right?”

They were spared the indignity of skulking around Ms. Jamison’s garden fence. The second time Anna tried the number, the lady answered on the first ring.

“Call me Katie,” she said, her voice slurring just a bit. “Kathryn was my grandmother. You want to come talk to me about a police report I made about the unicorn and dragons?” She laughed, her voice low and husky, a sexy laugh for a sixty-four-year-old woman. “It’s been a long time since I had to worry about a unicorn, right?” She laughed again. “But those dragons might burn something down and that would be a shame, don’t you think? That’s why I thought I should report them. Sure. Come on over.”

Ms. Jamison, “call me Katie,” lived in Gilbert, another Phoenix suburb, about fifteen minutes south and east of Dr. Vaughn’s house. Leslie pulled into the spotless, half-round driveway and parked. There were two fountains in front of the house, and the whole impression given was a combination of beauty and money, both flaunted with equal abandon.

Anna looked back at the road left and right and saw no sidewalks for jogging. The house, huge as it was, was set between two other houses that varied in architecture if not in stucco color.

“How’d a jogger see into the yard at all?” Anna asked. “Where would a jogger run?”

“Maybe the jogger knows the unicorn and the dragons,” murmured Leslie. “And flew over the stone wall and looked into the garden with her dog.” She put on a practiced smile and headed for the door.

“I’ll get you, my pretty,” murmured Anna in her best wicked-witch voice. “And your little dog, too.”

Ms. Jamison was tall and had muscle under her tanned and well-cared-for skin. Her chestnut hair was cut short and expensively. She looked closer to forty than sixty. Some of that might be surgical, but not all of it. She wasn’t stunning, but she was memorable.

She was also wearing a holey pair of jeans with dirt on the knees and a very ratty old ASU football jersey. She smelled like alcohol, for which she apologized.

“I was out gardening and drinking when you called,” she told them. “And now I’m a little drunk. I don’t usually overindulge, but my divorce from husband number three just came through. My sister told me he was just after my money, and she was right.”

She sighed. “I knew she was right. But he was thirty. He could keep up with me. Men my age…” She shook her head. “But, as I told her, that’s what a prenup is for. I guess he believed that if I thought he loved me, I’d be stupid in other ways, too. Caught him red … well, red-assed if the truth be known, and I have the photos to prove it. So he went and took nothing with him except for the liposuction on his stomach and two years of luxury living. I’d have paid a gigolo more for his services. But I’d have probably gotten better services.” She looked pensive.

“Do you want us to come back later?” Leslie asked.

“No. It’s all right,” she said. “Waiting would only waste your time and mine. I only had two shots—okay, three. But I did it on a full stomach and I’ve been drinking water since you called.”

Leslie looked doubtful, but Anna said, “Look. We’re not after her. We are not going to use this testimony in court. If we need real testimony, you can come back and get it.”

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Leslie asked. “We can return later.”

“That stupid jogger set the police on me. Her uncle is a judge, I think. Now she’s set the FBI. Sure. Come talk to me about unicorns and dragons.”